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Oracle announcing Oracle Public Cloud – First comments.

October 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I am at S.F. at the Oracle Open World conference right now where Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud in an entertaining and rather fun presentation just an hour ago. To see some more photos of the event and my paparazzi shot of Sting who already showed up for some 30 seconds: check out the Facebook site of my Oracle Cloud Computing book.

Larry picked up many ideas that I published earlier this year in my cloud computing book:

He was talking a lot about migrating from one cloud to another (mostly using AWS as an example, so they seem to be on the friend list). Also he emphasized that simple multi-tenant SaaS offers such as Salesforce.com with a shared DB are not real clouds and risky (because of the shared DB 🙂 ).

When Oracle’s position about clouds was rather fluffy (should I say cloudy?) even one year ago, I now hear them talking more about elasticity, self-service, chargeback etc.

What I didn’t like: So far this does not include pay-per use yet (one of my 4 criteria of cloud computing). Larry mentioned a monthly subscription during his keynote which was confirmed in the Thu morning keynote. Yet Oracle Enterprise Manger 12c is announced to provide metering at various levels.

I will post an update here as soon as there will be more details out tomorrow.

Apart from announcing the Oracle Public Cloud also Oracle Social Media (a part of Fusion Applications) was announced. See fotos on Facebook.

Filed Under: Announcement, CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: , , ,

AWS outage destroys EBS-based AMIs in Europe region

August 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I always recommend to create your own EBS-based AMIs (e.g. for running complex software such as Oracle Fusion Middleware). This hold true for the classic AMIs as well as for the converted Oracle VM templates. Never rely on the existence of AMIs provided by Oracle because:

– Oracle can change or update (or remove) them any time.

– They often don’t exist for certain AWS regions, they are S3-based or only exist based on 32-bit OEL instead of 64-bit.

– Also, the AMIs provided often don’t exist for a specific version of Oracle products.

So always create your own copy! Yet here is something to consider:

AWS broke an EBS-based AMI of mine by deleting arbitrary block in the image. This is particularly annoying since there is no easy way to create an offline copy an EBS-based AMI. You could rsync the running image to local computer but there is absolutely no support to get this done in a user-friendly way from the AWS console.

The good: They informed me in time (being in Sydney if something happens in the EU regions gives you an advantage) and sent an apology. They also replaced the deleted blocks with empty blocks.

The bad: It cost me several days to create this AMI which was an OEL EBS-based, full-blown installation of Oracle SOA Suite 11.1.1.5 (I still have to check if it will be usable after a file system check).

For a more detailed explanation of what happened take a look at Amazon’s summary of the events. It summarizes to an error in the EBS software that was overlayed with a power outage in Dublin.

Hello Amazon: Why don’t you provide an easy way to have an offline backup of EBS-based AMIs for disaster recovery?
Filed Under: CloudComputing Tagged With: , , ,

RDS: Real Cloud Computing with Oracle Databases

May 24, 2011 by 20 Comments

When designing your cloud architecture sooner or later the question about the database will arise. Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Oracle database instances provisioned with the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). However, there are many other options available, and in order to make an informed decision as to which will best suit your architecture, you should know the pros and cons of at least four:

  • You can start installing your database on an AMI with the operating system of your choice, or even select an AMI provided by Oracle and set up the included Standard or Enterprise Edition.
  • SimpleDB is an option if you prefer the scalability and availability of a non-relational database.
  • The relational database service from AWS offers a convenient and easy way to create and manage an Oracle MySQL database as a cloud service.
  • Starting today you can use RDS to create an Oracle database. So for the first time in the short history of cloud computing a licensed Oracle database can be used in the cloud with a pay per use model! You pay the database instance per hour used (or bring your own license)- and only this is real cloud computing.

I summarized my view in a detailed 12 page whitepaper (the weather here is too nice and I can’t bother myself putting all the screen shots into this blog posting).

The PDF describes all the details of RDS and compares them to the other options available. Also learn how to use WebLogic with RDS:

Cloud Databases and Oracle Whitepaper.

UPDATE: As of Aug/2012 there is support for APEX, Oracle XML DB and VPC now!

If you like to know more after reading the whitepaper have a look at my Oracle Cloud Computing book at Amazon and join the book’s Facebook site!

Filed Under: CloudComputing Tagged With: , , , ,

Ebook Released: Middleware and Cloud Computing

May 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a couple of fun days playing with (mostly disastrous) tools, converters and the Kindle itself I published the first Kindle edition of “Middleware and Cloud Computing”. It contains more than 100 coloured graphics (well, of course they are not coloured on your b/w Kindle, but on the Kindle reader for your Mac, PC, Android, iPad etc) and more than 100 clickable links to additional resources, publications and tools.

Please spread the word, twitter it to the networked part of the known universe and don’t forget to LIKE its Amazon and Facebook site. Do you you really, really want to support it? Sincerely? The best you could do is writing a review once you have read it.

 

thanks and best wishes,

Frank

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: , , , ,

Amazon’s AWS outage – did the Cloud Fail?

April 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 

There was a major outage in one of Amazon’s regions affecting several availability zones last Thursday.

– For a summary of the events and their impact see this blog entry of RightScale (I guess but I am not sure if it was written by Thorsten). The RightScale blog is updated now with some more details of the event.

 

– George Reese, the grand homme of Cloud Computing, calls this event a shining moment for clouds. Don’t get me wrong. I am big fan of George, not only because he is following me on twitter :). He gave a podcast interview repeating that you need to design for the cloud by designing for failure instead of sticking with your traditional architecture.

– Amazon did an poor job communicating what happened. Failures are a part of business but they have to be dealt with accordingly. Add this to your lessons learned list about Clouds. At least I did. Here is their summary.

– In my Cloud Computing book there is a whole chapter about RightScale (who provided the best analysis so far) as well as a section about disaster recovery and another one on designing for clouds (“why it is not enough to simply run WebLogic on AWS”) . There is also a free chapter for download available at Oracle’s Archbeat site.

IMHO this event teaches us that it is not enough to know how to simply run WebLogic on AWS or any other IaaS cloud provider such as Rackspace. By the way, this is one of the reasons why my book has more than the initially planned 120 pages …

Filed Under: CloudComputing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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